The Puntland Maritime Police
Force,trained by dozens of South African
mercenaries from sometime in 2010 to June 2012, was
run by a Dubai-based company called Sterling Corporate
Services that seems to be connected to the CIA.

The Times reports that in July a United Nations investigative
group uncovered that the force shared some facilities
with the Puntland Intelligence Service, a spy organization that
answers to the president of the semi-autonomous Somali
region of Puntland and has been trained by the CIA
for more than a decade.

Michael Shanklin, a former CIA station chief in Mogadishu,
was reportedly hired to work his contacts both in Washington and
East Africa to build support for the force while Erik
Prince,the founder of the private security
firm Blackwater, made
several trips to the Puntland camp to oversee the training of the
counter-piracy force.

The Times notes that Prince, a former
U.S. Navy Seal who had become an informal adviser to the crown
prince of Abu Dhabi, was simultaneously "involved in a
project to train Colombian mercenaries at a desert camp in the
emirates to carry out missions at the behest of the Emirati
government."

(Sidenote: According to leaked emails from
the private U.S. security firm Stratfor, during this time period
the former director of Blackwater, former CIA officer Jamie F.
Smith, was
aiding the Libyan opposition and subsequently sent to contact
Syrian rebels in Turkey at the request of a U.S. Government
committee.)

The South African trainers bailed in June 2012 after one
was shot by a Somali trainee, and recently about 500
former trainees—unpaid for weeks—were seen wandering the
Puntland Maritime Police Force desert compound
with two-years worth of weapons.

The Times notes that the options for the armed and
semi-trained mercenaries included joining up "with the pirates or
Qaeda-linked militants or to sell themselves to the highest
bidder in Somalia’s clan wars."